Lesson 8 Part 6: Moral Tribes 1, As Moral Hazards

In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology.
Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it.
We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.)
The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information.
The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons.
The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them.
Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.

审阅

RG

Definitely engaging my curiosity mind to a new level. Hard and challenging quizzes but regardless interesting.

ML

Nov 15, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Very interesting. A little bit long and tests are harsh especially when you are not a native english speaker.

从本节课中

Ethics and Ethnos

One more week on moral psychology. We’re almost done! This week we’re still talking about Jonathan Haidt, but then I shift to consider as well, the work of another psychologist, who is also a philosopher (by training): Joshua Greene. I talk about his popular book, "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us And Them". (By ‘popular’ I mean: written for a popular, i.e. non-scholarly specialist audience. I think it sold ok, too. But I don’t really have knowledge of that.) Per the title, it’s about tribalism, which is a big theme in "Reason and Persuasion", from "Euthyphro" to "Republic". Aristotle said we are political animals, by which he meant: living in a Greek style polis is the best! But you know what’s way more popular? Being an ethnic animal. (Greek ethnoi = tribe.) We have an instinct to stick with ‘our own’: family, friends, party, country. How much do we know about what’s going on in the brain, when we are like that? How should the facts about our instincts figure in our moral philosophies?

教学方

John Holbo, Associate Professor

脚本

Lesson 8, Part 6: Moral Tribes 1, New Pastures As Moral Hazards. We're moving on to Joshua Greene. Moral Tribes, Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between them and us. Who's Greene? He's a psychologist, but he got a PHD in philosophy. He's both a philosopher and a psychologist. He's alive. He teaches at Yale. In this video and the next I'm going to give a relatively condensed summary of Greene's basic thesis and argument. As I said in the last video, I really think Greene's argument is the argument Haidt should have given. Haidt's late and rather unclear come to utilitarianism moment, which I quoted. It's here on this slide. Needs to come earlier and more clearly. Empirically, psychologically, there isn't that much daylight between Haidt and Greene. They are more psychologists. They mostly agree about how the mind works. Greene is just more upfront about the idea of getting from that is to an aught via utilitarianism. This makes things generally clearer, and encourages more considerate framing. Why utilitarianism? What's it's status? Are we claiming it's true or what? Which form of utilitarianism are we advocating? Just saying there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism as Haidt does, and the slide is kind of sneaky. Is utilitarianism itself compelling because if not, it's just going to be down there with the other allegedly uncompelling competitors. Here's the next sentence from Haidt's book, I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws and public policy should aim as a first approximation to produce the greatest total good. Well, approximation is a fudge word, and we should give him some room to maneuver there. It's also nice that Haidt is saying nice things about Bentham, after saying some not nice things about him. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But, this isn't very specific. Greatest total good? Really? That sets the whole distribution question aside. We would really prefer to maximize the good even if it were distributed unjustly, some people get, getting everything, other people nothing. Just so long as there is a whole lot overall. What about justice? Plato would never have forgotten to ask about justice. Is the kind of thing that I think Green does, a relatively better job of trying to get a handle on. Although of course he has problems too. Let's press on. Greene opens his book with what he calls parable of the new pastors. The parable of the new pastors is supposed to be an example of, really a paradigm of what he calls, the tragedy of common sense morality. The tragedy of common sense morality is not as the name might suggest, the revelation that all our common sense morality is tragically wrong or disastrous. Rather, that stuff works pretty well mostly. But in some cases, under some circumstances, not. That's the new pastures. But I'm getting a bit ahead, let me tell the story. Greene imagines four different tribes of herders. In four different systems that they've worked out for running their lives. Why herders? Was Joshua Greene just thinking ahead? Holbos probably going to lecture about my book. He would've drawn these cute little round people and these fluffy sheeps. I'll make his life easy. I'll make my tribes herders, Holbo can just recycle his republic graphics, straight. I kind of doubt that was on his mind. In fact, it's more like this. herding is just a good and very natural choice of examples to illustrate certain so called common's problems. What's a common's problem? I'm glad you asked. In lots of herder communities land is held in common. Anyway, it isn't privately owned because sheep need lots of land. You have, you have a collective interest as a community in there being a healthy grazing commons. But of course, you have a selfish interest in getting as much for yourself as you can. As Greene says, cooperation is a problem when individual and collective interests are neither perfectly aligned, or perfectly opposed. We're getting out of my story again. Let me just introduce you to these herders, all right? No, wait, I lied. I'm going to put off introducing you just one more slide. Commons problems. You know what's a good contemporary example of a commons problem? Collapsing fish stocks. All the fishermen want there to be healthy stocks. But they also want to catch all the fish they can. You know what's another good contemporary example? Global warming. So when you see all the fluffy sheep in the next slides, don't just think fluffy sheep, so cute. Structurally these are very serious types of problems. When the problem isn't solved, the fish all go away, and don't come back if we boil the planet. That's what's called a tragedy of the commons. You notice that I used the same graphic as for that final Republic video the sociological imagination? Kind of the same idea. There are some problems that are hard to solve just by thinking about what I should do. For one thing, if everyone thinks like that, we'll all be in a heap of trouble. Joshua Greene is working a little variant of this very classic idea. Not a tragedy of the commons, but a tragedy of common sense morality. Okay, pushing on. Let me just introduce you to these herders. The first tribe, they all hold their pasture in common. Everyone gets the same number of sheep. Every family that is. You see how this makes sense, right? If anyone had too many sheep. If anyone had incentive to get as many sheep as they could. They might single handedly or single herdly over graze the pastor and wreck it for everyone. So you have a rule. [BLANK_AUDIO] You can, this works pretty well, on the other hand you can imagine what sorts of problems could result? Maybe one family decides to breed really big, fat sheep. But these sorts of problems are solvable. You get together the tribal elders, they make a decision, even if it's kind of clutchy. You can work it out. Second tribes, they hold all the pasture in common again. The number of sheep is proportionate to family size, not so far from the first tribe, so I'm recycling my graphic. But you can see how here again there might be some minor perverse incentives. Instead of going for big fat sheep, people might have an incentive to make Particularly big families, so they could have more sheep. Could that be a problem? Maybe. But very likely the system can basically muddle through. Third tribe, the Capitalists. Well, the private owners. They don't hold the land in common. When every family has its private plot and its private herd, good fences make good neighbors, as an American poet once observed. Fourth tribe. The communists. They hold the land in common and all the animals in common. Now, at this point, someone is going to want to say, well, yeah, but we know capitalism works better than communism anyway. 20th century anybody? But I would encourage you to hold that thought. I think it's not all that implausible that for a tribe of herders, communism could work better or at least as well. Even though it doesn't work better for whole industrialized, modern nations plausibly. One reason it might work as well is, I kind of already gave it. Sheep, so I am reliably informed, do best if they can graze over large areas. Furthermore one year the grass might be great on the hill, the next year in the valley. But families need to eat every year, so cutting the land up into plots might not work well. So there's one good reason to suppose that private land ownership might not be an optimal strategy for these tribes, although of course I imagine it could certainly work. For the sake of argument just take my word for it. All four systems could work. They could have their advantages and disadvantages. The cases they handle well and badly. What we're looking for is just four plausible and plausibly stable alternative models of moral common sense, when it comes to solving a basic commons problem. If for any reason you don't accept one of Greene's four, as potentially stable just substitute some system you think would work. Surely you grant that anthropologically herder communities could differ significantly in their basic modes of social organization. We could have four different tribes, even though everyone is raising sheep, and everyone kind of wants the same things basically. They all love their kids, they need food and shelter, so forth. You know what? I really don't want to argue about the best practices for sheep farming. I promised you tragedy, so here it goes. The four tribes are separated by a natural barrier. A mighty forest. Until one day, a fire. Oh no, you say. Are the fluffy sheepies alright? Don't worry they are fine. For all I know all the woodcutters who live in the woods are dead. But, then maybe they should have thought ahead and picked career paths, that afford philosophers more opportunities for thinking about interesting commons problems. Anyway long story short, the fire is actually good news for the herders, or so it would seem. Forest burns down which from a herders point of view it's a good thing, new land cleared. But, who is going to get it, and how is it going to be governed? All four tribes move in stake their claim, you can imagine how it goes. There is bound to be some conflict. You got all these new good stuff in the absence of settled institutions, there is a certain likelihood of fighting. But notice, the existence of this four candidate systems of moral common sense, as Greene calls them, is pretty much bound to exacerbate the problem. The systems are incompatible, grinding the social gears. Instead of just having people fighting, which would've been bad enough, we're going to have people fighting and systems clashing. And this is rather ironic, because the systems evolved precisely to facilitate cooperation. All four of the systems exist so that people can get along without killing each other. When it comes to the distribution of goods. When it comes to cooperation cases, in which our individual interests and common interests are neither perfectly aligned nor perfectly opposed. Each of these systems individually makes it so that not killing your neighbor on a regular basis, but instead doing some other thing that results in a plausibly non-zero-sum gain for all. That thing is moral common sense. And yet, under certain circumstances, the existence of these competing regimes of moral common sense, can make the cooperation problem harder. Rather than easier, hence the tragedy of common sense morality. Let me skip to Greene's conclusion which involves skating over a few rather significant plot points and argument points, but I think you'll get the gist. Me versus Us, relatively easy problem. Moral common sense makes it relatively easy to deal with the me versus Us problem. Each individual community has a pretty good practical handle on me versus us. When me versus us rears its ugly head, they've got a principled answer, it's not perfect, but it works. But moral common sense in its various forms. Makes it harder to deal with us versus them and this is a peculiarly modern problem. Now you might immediately object, modern, what are you new. Surely we humans have been fighting with the neighbors over the hill, for as long as we've been herding sheep. Us versus them, well, if it isn't as ancient as me versus us. Then it's very ancient indeed. But Greene puts it this way. This is an ancient tactical problem. No doubt. What do we do about those strangers living over the hill? But in modern times, this sort of collision makes for distinctive ethical problems as well. I think the tragedy of common of moral common sense is a pretty good name for it. Next video, the brain. Now I know what you're thinking. Holbo, to make the brain you just rearranged one of your sheep and colored it pink. You're right and that's what I did. That wasn't very scientific of me. That's fair enough. But my reason for thinking that sheep have something to do with the brain isn't just that they're both are sort of puffy when you make cartoons out of them. Joshua Greene wants to argue not just that there is a distinctive tendency of moral common sense to devolve, into a tragedy of moral common sense under modern new pastor conditions. He wants to argue additionally it's kind of built into us, our moral brains. Probably, be it noted, all sentences that contain the phrase, built into our brains should also contain the word probably at the very least. A lot of this stuff is hypothetical, bordering on speculation. That's not bad, but just keep it mind. Don't believe things just because there's a cartoon of them. Moving right along. Joshua Greene wants to say that morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to cooperate. Well, okay, that's more of a definition. He doesn't argue for it. It's a, it's going to slot into an argument. It's a stipulative definition, but it's supposed to be a definition that suits the known facts. The known biological and psychological facts. Morality is an adaptive trait. Speaking of biology, what about that ugly guy there on the right? Remember him? I was pointing out that famously naked mole rats get along really really well with other naked mole rats? As mammals go, they are the most usocial of mammals. Because like bees and ants they're all brothers or sisters. Does this mean that according to Greene's argument they're the most moral, the most cooperative. Which sounds faintly absurd as this mock Pericles bust was supposed to indicate. I think not. Why not? Well, ants and bees and mole rats don't have as it were, an in built engine of selfishness that needs compensating for, by means of some or other in built moral mechanism. Go back to this slide from two videos ago. It makes no sense, either to admire or feel contempt for those ants on the left. Heroically doing their Mcjobs. Or stuck in their Mcjobs, however you choose to project our categories on to them, hanging upside down, feeding other people out of their abdomens. There isn't some part of these ants that's thinking about doing the thing on the right. So it's a bit silly to praise or blame them morally either for repressing or failing to express their true individuality. Morality is a stabilization device for creatures with divided minds or selves you might say, that's us. But it isn't ants or mole rats, creatures that aren't divided against themselves. Read chapter 1 of Haidt's book, the divided self, sorry that's, it's from the happiness hypothesis. Creatures that aren't divided against themselves don't need morality, not as Greene has defined it. Confused? Here's an analogy. Amphibians, you know what those are, they're able to live in water and on dry land. Humans are able to live very selfishly, but also hyper socially. Just amphibians have certain distinctive adaptive traits that suit their mixed lifestyles. We humans have certain adaptive traits that suit our mixed social lifestyles, to wit morality. Maybe we can even say that the thing we have in common with amphibians is a certain tendency to engage in dramatic metamorphosis. But probably I'm just trying to recycle this slide, that took me sometime to draw thank you very much. We humans are moral animals. In this sort of pictorial cooperative sense, that is we can avert your typical average sheep related small scale tragedy of the commons type threat. People fight over sheep we can work it out, we have got kin alter-ism and reciprocal alter-ism. We're fairly averse to killing each other. We're good at detecting cheaters. I'm not really going into too much of this, because I hope you already read some Jonathan Haidt. So it sounds kind of familiar. Sub-conclusion. Morality evolved to solve tragedy of the commons type threats. But, morality allegedly did not evolve to solve tragedy of moral common sense type threats, that is because we're built so well to solve one kind of problem, we're badly engineered to solve a different kind of problem. We are bad at us versus them, as a result of being good at me versus us. As a moral problem. That's Josh Greene 's claim. Where's Plato in all this? You're going to tell us he thought of it all before, aren't you Professor Holbo? Hm, sort of. Remember the Ring of Gyges, a very clear thought experiment in its way. What if he didn't have to worry about suffering because of your injustice? You don't have to worry about losing reputation, you are being punished, you'd be unjust right, an visibility ring is quite clear, as a means for solving certain variables. This guy Gyges we can see right through him. All the same, if you remember there are a lot of colorful details to that story. More than your average well-engineered thought experiment would seem to need. The bronze horse and in it the dead giant, what's all that about? Oh, yeah. I gotta show you the slide. This is what it looks like. What's all that about? In a weird sort of way, the tail of Gyges the shepherd is a lot like Joshua Geene's Parable of the New Pastures. How so? Well, starts with the shepherd. Just kind of living his ordinary life, doop de doop de doo, living with the sheep, all in tune with nature, sun is out and shining. An earthquake. kind of like Joshua Greene imagining a sudden fire. Natural disaster. The natural disaster sort of knocks us out of our natural rhythms. Out of the disaster comes something apparently golden and good, but it's kind of a poisoned gift. A moral hazard, you know what that means? If you don't know what that means look it up on Wikipedia. [BLANK_AUDIO] Poisoned with injustice to come. Does this mean that Plato came up with the whole tragedy of common sense morality thing before Joshua Greene even thought of it? Up to a point, but not completely. Plato, like Greene is impressed by how ordinary ways of thinking morally, which may mostly steer you right in ordinary circumstances, can steer you really wrong if some unusual circumstance arises. That said, there's an important difference. Plato seems to see Thrasymachus as the threat. The threat is that we will be undermined by too much me, egoism. Greene, on the other hand, thinks that isn't so much of a problem in practice. We don't need a reason in philosophy to deal with Thrasymachus. Every community of herders knows how to deal with that guy. Beat him up with a stick if you catch him. But we do need philosophy to deal with us versus them. Next video, meta-morality and common currency, in manual mode we trust.